Monday, July 21, 2014

Conway Bead with Dodecahedron 5-Coloring of Vertices

This Conway Bead is a beaded bead, woven from blue, green, purple, and
silver seed beads in different shapes including drops and O-beads. This
ornate cluster is composed of nearly 400 beads, each one precisely woven
into place. I used five different colors for the background, giving the
piece an interesting symmetry where every hole touches each color
exactly once.

If you look at just one of the colors, say lime green, for example, they form the vertices of a regular tetrahedron. Since there are five colors, there are five tetrahedrons. Thomas Hull has made an origami model of five intersecting tetrahedrons that exhibits the same coloring as my beaded bead.